At the Club of Ministry of Testing, Rosie Sherry asked to share test ideas in five words or less. My first test idea was: use the screen reader. That saved 1 word.

Introducing the screen reader

Describing the screen reader

A screen reader is a program, which reads aloud, what is happening on the screen. This program is used by blind or visually impaired users. Now they can get their own information or buy their own things. There is less need for help from family members or friends. That saves 5 minutes or more.

Mentioning aspects of the screen reader

My first experience was reading a legal text on a laptop. It was about Content. Now you might ask which other aspects are applicable.

During the demonstration, the cursor sprung from one paragraph to the next one with a short cut or key combination. The first paragraphs formed an introduction, which could be skipped after listening to the first sentence. So, the next aspect is Construction.

During the last years I noticed, that also my input was spoken aloud. Especially the buttons with a restricted input like checkboxes and combo boxes. It is always nice to hear, what I selected. This leads to the next aspect: Control.

There are some parts in the world, where people can speak different languages. For example, I live in the Netherlands and read English. One of my apps overruled the language of the screen reader, so I do not hear Dutch words with an English pronunciation. That is quite agreeable to hear. The last aspect is Choice of language.

So, testing with a screen reader is about Content, Control, Construction, and Choice of language. This will come back later.

Finding a screen reader

A lot of operating systems have a built-in screen reader. Windows has Narrator and Apple MacOS systems Voice Over. On the mobile front there is TalkBack on Android and VoiceOver on the iOS. On Windows there are alternatives like NVDA and JAWS, which is a part of Fusion.

Did I mention LINUX? There are also screen readers available for that operating system.

How to test with a screen reader

Let’s go back to Content, Control, Construction, and Choice of language. As promised.

How to test Content

Move the focus to images. By hovering the mouse above the a over a picture. Or pointing with a finger on the picture on a touchscreen. A picture should have a short story in the alternative text like the pictures in this test automation blog post. The same applies for a graph or a map.

How to test Control

Select a button and listen to the alternative text. This should explain the interaction of the button. Some buttons with nice pictograms might miss some explanation.

Select a value in a combo box or a switch, then listen to the selected value. Check boxes in cookie banners can be quite confusing,

Check whether the format of an input field is read aloud. For example, the date has the format DD-MM-YYYY. In case of error, check whether the error message is clear.

Check the code of the GUI or Graphical User Interface. The alternative text should be filled, if the button has a picture or if a graph is used. A possible solution might be static code analysis. There are accessibility test tools, but they might miss strange alternative texts.

Find the button using the find function of the screen reader. One of the most frequent used buttons, the Logout button, is sometimes hidden in unexpected ways. Note, that a screen reader can convert text to braille, A deaf blind user can use a braille reader to navigate a web site or app.

Feel the course, Luke.

How to test Construction

Check the use of proper headings. I like to
have good overview of an article, why not offer it to people with bad vision? Screen readers offer a nice list of headings and their levels like ”heading level 3, How to test Construction”. The list of headings also gives a user a fast way to jump to the section like “How to test with a screen reader – 2”.

Is it possible to make short cuts? It is like shopping in a super market. I do not want walk pass every shelf for buying only three items. A screen reader like JAWS has a feature to bookmark a certain place on a web page. This is a time saver.

Do you hear where you are or you do? A screen reader like JAWS stores everything it said. It is called history. If the history is not clear, how can a user know what is happening?

Compare the histories of two different executions of the same customer journey with each other. They should be the same, unless the differences are the results of bug fixes. In this case a new baseline for the history must be made. Emily Bache calls this Approval Testing. There are tools available to compare text files. My inner test automation nerd is pondering about combining RPA, a  file comparison tool, and Selenium.

How to test Choice of language

Set the language of the screen reader to English and open a Dutch app. Listen where Dutch is spoken. Or choose the favourite languages of your users based on user data.

A similar test could be executed for a web site. There is an HTML tag for language.

To be continued